Bookworm Transcripts

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So question for you, have you tried yoga?

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I did.

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Okay.

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Yes.

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I did yoga with my wife.

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Okay.

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I was going to ask because Rachel does this, right?

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Yep.

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And you joined her.

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This is not a you going off on your own and doing something completely new.

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This is you joining her.

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Yeah.

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I think if I would have tried to do it on my own, I probably would have

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completely written it off, but she takes classes for it at the gym that we

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belong to.

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And so when we were on vacation, we did yoga one night and she showed me some

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very basic moves, which were way more difficult than I thought they would be.

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And then also what was cool about it, my big takeaway from it was that there's a

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mindfulness and a breathing part to it.

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So it's kind of like mindfulness meditation.

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And so I definitely am going to continue to tinker with this.

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I'm not sure if it's going to make it into my morning routine, but I definitely

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see where this could check a couple boxes for me, both in like the meditation,

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but the benefits I get from meditation using an app like Headspace.

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One of the things that I should have been doing for a long time,

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my wife has been encouraging me to do for a very long time is stretching.

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Okay.

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I'm not very flexible.

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And so I know that and I know that occasionally, like if I don't stretch for

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a period of time, I will have like sciatic nerve pain in my back, which is why we've

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got that inversion table in our bedroom now.

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Okay.

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I have no trouble, you know, inverting for a few minutes every day, but all the other

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additional stretches that I'm quote unquote supposed to do, I have trouble

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following through with those.

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But if I can combine it with the mindfulness of meditation, for example,

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into a practice of yoga, that might stick, but we'll have to have to see.

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So is yoga going to stick?

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You're going to maintain this or is this a fun experiment that needs to die off?

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We will see.

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I'm not sure yet.

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I have a feeling that it could stick, but I need to give it a few more tries and

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develop a routine with it.

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Like she was showing me some basic moves and I can see how you can tie these

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together and do certain stretches.

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So I need to sit down with my wife and she's going to listen to this.

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So I'm sure she'll hold me accountable to this and figure out like what is a basic,

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like five, 10 minute thing that I could do every morning as like my yoga routine.

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And then I will give that a shot.

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All right.

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I wish you all the best.

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I'm not a yoga person.

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I have no plans for yoga.

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Don't count on that one.

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I had never considered myself a yoga person either.

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You know who is into yoga.

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I hope he's okay with me sharing this, but he was raving about it when I saw

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him at max stock last year is Brett Terpstra.

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And he's actually pretty good at it.

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He he would post some stuff on on Twitter of some different moves that he was

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doing in Rachel's song.

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He's like, wow, she he's he's really good.

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Yeah.

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I've seen a few of his things on Instagram.

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Another person who you probably wouldn't think would necessarily be into into yoga.

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I guess a lot of athletes are into yoga as well because it not only provides

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the stretching, but also balance.

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Okay.

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I'll let you guys go for it.

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Maybe someday you will convince me to try it.

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I don't have time for the fun little things that I want to do now.

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So trying to incorporate that seems kind of superfluous at the moment.

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So I'm not going to go there, but you're welcome to, but I will ask you about it next

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time, got to do it for the podcast.

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You know, just like me buying a home pod, right?

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Right.

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Right.

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You have to explain this.

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So, okay, Mike sent me something about you had bought a, you had purchased a home

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pod.

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I did.

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And somehow passed this off as, you know, like research or sacrificing for bookworm.

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So I suppose that means you now have to at some point, I don't know that you're

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ready for it now, but at some point, that means in order for that to fully come

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through, you need to talk about the home pod.

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Well, here's the deal.

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As you know, I am working on creating an office in the basement of our house, which

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I sent you a couple of pictures.

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It's coming together.

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Yes.

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The bookshelf is up, which is awesome.

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I have it almost full, by the way, except for the top shelf.

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I love that the first order of business on this new office is the bookshelf course.

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Yeah.

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So there's a ton of books down there, a bunch of hulaids down there.

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And we have a sonos play three that I was planning to put in there.

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And if you look in the picture that I had sent you, that top cubby, basically, in

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the bookshelf, that has a hole in the, the very top for the cord to go up.

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And then because I'm building this thing or having somebody build this from scratch,

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there's an outlet up behind the lip on the top of the bookshelf.

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Yeah.

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So it was designed to put a speaker in there because I want to have music in my office.

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Now the thing that I was thinking about, because we've got so

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no one else in Apple music networks, that works great.

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But if I don't want to listen to music, if I want to listen to a podcast, for example,

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there's really no easy way to do that with the sonos.

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And so I know that the home pod is going to support airplay too.

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Okay.

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And when I was thinking about, should I use this play three and get another play three

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for the basement that I'm taking it from?

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Well, it's still not going to do everything that I want it to do.

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And for basically the same cost, I could get this home pod, which I know I can

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airplay to right now and eventually will support airplay too as well.

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And I'm hoping that that will allow me to just like when I walk into the office,

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I'm listening to a podcast and overcast, I can just send that to the home pod and

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continue to do whatever.

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Like I'm hoping to basically live in this office.

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I'm never trying to get it done.

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So that's why that's why I bought it and I've been really happy with it.

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I know it has limitations.

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I can't read you your calendar and stuff like that.

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If it read me my calendar, it'd be, you know, a 10 minute or deal anyways.

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So yeah, I don't really want it to do that.

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I just want it to play music and I want it to sound good and it does sound awesome.

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Yeah.

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That was one of the things I heard quite a bit was people who purchased a home pod

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raved about the quality of the sound out of the thing.

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So yeah, go for it.

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I don't really have like in my office, I always use headphones.

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I don't really know why I don't play it out loud.

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I think it has more to do with.

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I use the headphones to help drown out some of the life of having little kids at home,

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running around, you know, 10 feet away from the door to my office.

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So I don't think something like that would work well because it doesn't help

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eliminate the distractions at the same time unless I really cranked it up.

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And then that's too much for me.

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So it just doesn't really work out in the space that I'm in.

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But I think what you're talking about with where yours is, I think that makes a

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lot of sense and I could totally see doing what you're doing.

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So I'm not crazy.

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I don't think you're crazy, at least not entirely.

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So unintentional follow up item there.

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Next one you've we've got here is develop my seeing skills, which I had

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committed to doing a picture a day in March.

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I'm not sure how much you've been on Instagram, but I've been doing this.

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Yeah, that's going well, although it's been a little bit easy because I've been

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on vacation in Florida.

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Yeah.

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Once I've burned through all the pictures I took on vacation, it'll be a little bit

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more difficult, but yeah.

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I was saying I've been noticing the pictures you're posting and it seems like

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when people are not home, they post more often on Instagram anyway.

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So to be honest with you, I kind of forgot that this was an action item of yours,

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even though I was seeing all of these pictures because it felt like, oh,

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Mike's on vacation.

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He's posting pictures of vacation and it just didn't register.

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It's like, oh, he's just being more active here lately.

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Oh, well, of course he's on vacation.

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It'll quit when he's at home.

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So prove me wrong.

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I'm hoping to prove you wrong.

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Now I will say though that the intended result of this experiment,

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I have seen work because, well, it maybe is easy for a lot of people to take

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pictures when they're on vacation.

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I typically don't reach for my camera.

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I have in the past just wanted to enjoy the moment and not worry about

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capturing a picture.

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And a lot of times what that results in is like no pictures of my wife,

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yeah, which she teases me about sometimes.

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And so while I was on vacation, yes, I didn't have the normal pressure of a normal

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workday, but I did consciously try and I'd say I succeeded, at least on vacation,

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to notice those moments as they were happening and to capture them with the

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camera. And so once you do that, then you can go back and you can,

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even like tell little stories with them.

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One of the ones I posted was probably the least attractive picture out of all

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of them was this place called Tin City, which is in Naples.

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And it's all of these buildings that have these tin roofs and they're like

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built a long time ago and they were built real cheaply.

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It's where basically all the fishermen come and they park right there on the

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pier and they clean the fish and stuff like that.

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There's a whole bunch of pelicans there obviously because the fish are being

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clean and my kids just love that place.

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Right.

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There's also a really good restaurant with really good seafood, which we go to

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pretty much every year.

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So it's one of my favorite places, even though it doesn't look that great,

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I guess, as we were walking in.

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I'm like, I need a picture of this.

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And then when I posted it on Instagram, I basically told the short version of

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that story.

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And I thought that that was really cool.

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And then one other thing that I had forgotten that I had done was I used

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IFTTT to capture my Instagram feed and send it to a photos journal in day one.

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So nice.

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Unexpected benefit of this.

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I have a journal with all of these pictures that I've been posting to

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Instagram.

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So if I wanted to, at the end of this experiment, for example, day one has the

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ability where you can publish these books.

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So I could publish one for all the entries from the month of March, 2018, which I

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think is pretty cool.

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I think that's one of the downfalls of IFTTT.

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Like people tend to forget about what they have going on there.

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And you either have things show up automatically, they get posted automatically

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or you go into a directory on your computer someday and realize there's a

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thousand files in there that you had set up to automatically be downloaded and

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created and like, what?

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Where did all this come from?

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So yeah, I think that's one of the downfalls of it.

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But at the same time, it can also have some of these really cool side effects,

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like what you're talking about.

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Like, that's kind of cool.

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This thing I've set up a while back is now coming to reality in a very fun way

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and in a surprising way.

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Yeah.

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Uh, and the reason that I forgot about it was I had set it up for an example

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of the workflow that I put together using a journal called photos.

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And then the other day I was thinking through how I'm using day one and just

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started creating journals for all these different use cases.

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I moved all of my quotes from quote book into day one since quote book is

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defunct and I cannot find anything else that will integrate with it.

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And I created a workflow action, which allows me to send stuff straight there

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pretty much the same way I did it with quote book, where I send the author and

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the, the quote and the author to a specific journal.

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I was thinking through the other journals I might want and went through

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the common commonplace book stuff and like what sorts of things might I want

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to collect there and photos seem to be a real logical one, but I hadn't done

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anything with it.

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And then I started this experiment and all of a sudden all these photos

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from Instagram start showing up and I'm like, Oh, hey, that's pretty cool.

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Cool.

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So what's your life theme?

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There's a bit of a jump for you.

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And now for something completely different.

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All right, so this was a really interesting action item given the book

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that we read for today, which we may eventually get to.

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But here's what I've come up with so far.

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And I think this is probably a work in progress.

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But my life theme is to help people answer the question, why am I here?

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By inspiring, encouraging and teaching them how to discover their destiny,

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connect to their calling and live the life they were created for.

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That's the best version I've come up with so far.

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Cool.

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And I think given the book we're going to go through today, this book may impact

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that I would guess.

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Yep.

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And I'm a little bit ahead of schedule.

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So I'm partway through the following book as well.

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And I can tell you that that one may change it as well.

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So I think it's smart to say this is a work in progress because I, you know,

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we work in the productivity space and it's natural to develop the missions

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and visions and stuff like that.

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So I think they're continually morphing to one extent or another.

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So I'm with you there.

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Definitely fun to pencil in.

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Don't put it in pen.

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Yeah.

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And I think that's one of the things that people make a mistake in is, you know,

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they, they think through what's most important to me.

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They write it down and then five years later, they never go back and revisit it

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and think about how things have changed because they think that if things have

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changed, they got it wrong.

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It's not necessarily the case.

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The whole purpose of the vision or the wise to inspire the action that you're

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trying to create.

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And if you follow through on that action and it gets you to a certain point

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and then you decide you need to pivot, that's completely fine.

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So yeah, I anticipate not just because of what the next book is,

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but just in general that this is going to change and I would probably revisit

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this more often than I should because I tend to ask those questions.

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Like, is this still true?

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Is this still the right thing?

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Which is good because, you know, a lot of people, they go to a conference and

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someone says, you should develop a life mission and, you know, they, they drink

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the juice and get all excited and they develop their mission and they print it

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and put it on a wall.

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And three years later, you ask them what they're doing in life and they can't

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tell you because well, there's this mission thing that I'm theoretically

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following, but they never go over it, which is kind of sad.

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Yes.

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I wish more people would go over it and actually do something with it instead

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of just put it on the wall and walk away.

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So that touches on like the three components here and why I think a lot of

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people miss this is they hear like, you need to create this, this vision,

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but people have no idea how.

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And so the first part of this inspiring people, that's really tied to this book.

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I mean, Victor Frankel, wow, I would love to met this guy.

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Yeah.

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But having an example of somebody that has done what you're trying to do is

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a lot of times enough to get you to step out there and try it.

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And I really believe that people are capable of a lot more than they give

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themselves credit for and they don't have a model to follow.

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And so if my life can inspire people to do something that they didn't think they

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could do, that's what I want to have happen.

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And then another piece of this encouraging.

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So it's one thing to see somebody.

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It's another thing to have them tell you, hey, Joe, you can do this.

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As we're recording this, I am preparing to record for Mac power users.

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I hope that's okay to say, but David Sparks is one of the guys who when I first got

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into the productivity space, he was one of my internet heroes.

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I called them and my wife would always make fun of me for that term.

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But these were people on the internet that I really looked up to.

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And now I have a quasi digital relationship with him.

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It's encouraging to hear his feedback on like, hey, you should try this.

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You should do this because I never thought that I would have that platform

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with that person.

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And that's why if somebody reaches out to me and says, Hey, I read your book.

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I heard you on this podcast and they ask a question.

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I do my best to respond to them because I remember what that was like when I had

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no justification or I had no reason to even be at the table and just stepping out

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there and doing it and having having key people.

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Like I remember when I first started my blog, Mike Vardy commented on one of the

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blog posts that I wrote because I linked to one of his articles.

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And it was like the second thing I ever wrote and he's telling me like, Hey, yeah,

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keep going.

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I was like blown away when that happened.

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And I want to create those experiences for other people.

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So that's the encouraging piece.

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And then also teaching them how that's not enough just to say you need a vision.

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There's, if you can break things down, if you know what to do, you can make it a

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simple process to follow.

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All you have to do is ask the right questions and you'll arrive at the right

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answers.

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But I think that there's a lot of people in the space who are just saying, Hey,

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yeah, go do this and they don't, they don't bother to break it down for people

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and show them how to do that.

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Yeah, that's fair.

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I think there's a lot of information out there about how to come up with like

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a life theme.

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And it usually involves, and we make fun of this from time to time.

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It usually involves like going on a retreat or getting away or something

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along those lines.

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And I feel like that's, I'm not going to say it's a bad thing.

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Like if that's something you have the time for and you want to do, go for it.

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But I have a tendency to err on the side of, you know, you kind of already know

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the answer to this, just put it on paper and then start working with it.

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Cause you're going to change it.

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Like don't get too bent out of shape over making sure it's correct on day one.

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And if you want to try to get it correct on day one and a hundred percent,

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that's fine.

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Just know that in, you know, three months time, you're probably going to change it again.

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So yeah, don't don't get too caught up in it.

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The answer to the question, is this the right thing or is this the right thing?

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Is yes.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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So tell me how, how your family time can become a flow activity.

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Cause this was something that you wanted to do, which comes from our book, Flow by Mahali,

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which was taking your family time and creating kind of the best of all worlds

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and making that a flow task, maybe not a task thing that you do.

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Very descriptive term there.

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So there's, hasn't been a whole lot of progress on this one simply because

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I've been on vacation pretty much the whole time.

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Yeah.

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Um, so what I said in the previous episode, I think still applies where I want to, uh,

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specifically use story time as a flow activity, uh, when the kids go to bed.

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And then also with the older ones, like building stuff out of, out of Legos, that

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one I haven't taken action on yet.

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Cause we literally got back as a recording this day and a half ago.

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And I also think that this gets a lot easier when Omni focus three,

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lets me into the beta and I can start using tags to classify my things as the

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right modes.

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Like I talked about, you know, have that restriction with papers.

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So I haven't really done a whole lot with this.

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I'm on the list.

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I signed up for it and I've been seeing people recently post stuff on social media

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about it and I'm a little jealous.

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Uh, I went in, but you don't have to worry about that.

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If you're on paper, right.

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It's true.

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Joe be like, it's true.

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I'll keep beating the drum.

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So you're relying on Omni focus three for this flow activity and your family

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thing.

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That's what I heard.

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Well, not complete, not completely.

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But I do think that before I can identify the activities that fit with the non

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dominant modes or even just the modes that I'm not using the majority of the day,

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that I need to be able to track how I am spending time in those modes and Omni

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focus checking off the tasks that are tagged that way is the easy way to do that.

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So I don't want to spend a bunch of time creating a system, which is going to be

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throwing out the window, literally the minute that Omni focus three becomes

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available because I'm already sold.

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Okay.

00:19:22

I still like my notebook.

00:19:23

Fair enough.

00:19:23

Let's see.

00:19:24

I've got a couple of them here for follow up.

00:19:28

One of them is create competition of some kind with the work I do for clients.

00:19:33

And I can't say that I've made much progress on this.

00:19:37

I'm not even really sure what it means to do this.

00:19:39

I mean, the, the, the few things that I've come up with on it is trying to like

00:19:44

game how fast I can get them done, but I have to be careful with that.

00:19:47

Cause I don't want to sacrifice quality at the same time.

00:19:49

So it's kind of a tricky balance there.

00:19:52

So I don't really have a real clean answer on how you do that with client work.

00:19:58

I think there may be something in the long, the lines that involves, because I've

00:20:02

been subcontracting a lot of my development time to a handful of other guys.

00:20:07

So I'm, I'm starting to do some of that, but it seems kind of weird to turn that

00:20:12

into a competition too.

00:20:13

So I'm not real sure what this means, but the intent here is to help create this

00:20:18

flow state with my client work.

00:20:21

And some of that kind of means I'm trying to create flow with email.

00:20:24

That's not fun.

00:20:25

I mean, maybe there's a way to, to game that such that it becomes a fun thing.

00:20:29

Maybe that's what I should be trying to do, but I'm still exploring some options

00:20:33

on that one.

00:20:34

So if you have any ideas, I'm, I'm all ears.

00:20:36

Email is the most anti flow activity known to me.

00:20:39

I'm with you there.

00:20:42

I, I am not good at or enjoy email at all.

00:20:46

I'm bad at it.

00:20:48

I really am.

00:20:49

All right.

00:20:50

So that's one that I'm working on.

00:20:52

Another one that actually has been working out really well is visualizing my

00:20:55

day ahead of time.

00:20:56

And this has worked out extremely well with the process that I go through of

00:21:03

reviewing my lists in the morning and then writing out what, what it is that I

00:21:07

want to do today, along with my schedule for that day.

00:21:10

And that process of putting it on paper and looking at that and then taking

00:21:14

just a few minutes to think about how that's actually going to come through in

00:21:19

the day.

00:21:19

It does a couple of things.

00:21:21

It helps me actually see the path that I'm going to follow.

00:21:23

And hopefully I actually follow through with that.

00:21:25

Uh, but it also sometimes will show me where I don't have enough buffer between

00:21:32

things because I'm pretty good at seeing how long something will take, but

00:21:37

until I sit down and try to visualize myself going through that process ahead

00:21:42

of time, like until I do that, it just seems like I can't nail down.

00:21:45

It seems like I can't nail down how it's going to flow from one piece to the next.

00:21:51

And once I work through, like, I'm going to, I'm going to be working on

00:21:55

getting this particular piece deployed.

00:21:56

And once I get that done, then I'll move on to this.

00:21:58

And when I'm playing out time frames in my head and where I'm going to be and

00:22:02

how that's going to work, I may realize that doing that deployment is going to

00:22:06

take a little longer than I originally thought it would, but I didn't fully

00:22:09

connect that until I started playing out the day ahead of time.

00:22:11

So that has proved to be a very valuable step in my morning that I've started

00:22:16

to implement kind of a fun one.

00:22:17

I guess.

00:22:18

Nice.

00:22:18

Almost sounds like work based meditation kind of, which is kind of interesting

00:22:24

because I've been doing a some form of a meditation practice for a while now.

00:22:30

And it's kind of morphed into a, I mean, this particular vision,

00:22:36

visualize visualization process does play into that meditation time very closely.

00:22:43

Like I'll do that visualization right before I do that partially because it gets

00:22:46

it out of my head and I'm not worrying about how things are going to work for

00:22:49

that day.

00:22:49

So it kind of does.

00:22:50

I mean, I know it's kind of a joke, like, you know, ribbed me a little bit there,

00:22:55

but that's, that's kind of what it works out to be.

00:22:57

So I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but it works well for me.

00:23:00

I know that.

00:23:01

That's cool.

00:23:02

No, I think that the cool thing about meditation is that there really isn't a

00:23:05

right or wrong way necessarily of that's the thing that gets a lot of people

00:23:10

caught up on it when they start is the fact that their mind wanders and they feel

00:23:14

like, Oh, because my mind is wondering, I'm failing.

00:23:16

No, the mind wandering is part of the process and the value is in the exercise

00:23:22

of bringing it back to, to attention.

00:23:24

And I think that whatever mechanism you use to focus that attention is beneficial.

00:23:30

I think that visualization is definitely a piece of this.

00:23:35

And I think that the fact that you're using it to visualize your workday,

00:23:38

that's completely fine.

00:23:40

There probably is some value also of visualizing your non workday and making

00:23:46

that break from work mode at some point.

00:23:48

But as I mentioned in the last episode, one of my action items, like rethinking the

00:23:54

the very concrete boundaries that I've placed around when and how I work.

00:23:59

Like I'm not in a position right here to tell you that you shouldn't do that.

00:24:02

Right.

00:24:04

Now, I will say that this is not just my workday.

00:24:07

I should call that out because I'll come down from getting, you know,

00:24:11

taking shower and such in the morning and then I'll sit down and do my Bible

00:24:16

reading and prayer time first thing because I want to make sure that's, that's

00:24:19

number one.

00:24:20

Let's be honest here.

00:24:21

So once I get past, you know, that time, which is kind of a meditation process in

00:24:28

itself, once I do that, then I'll do that day planning process.

00:24:32

But that's not just my workday.

00:24:33

Like I'm because I'm self employed and I work from home and I set my own schedule

00:24:37

in every way.

00:24:38

I am planning from 6 a.m.

00:24:41

to 9 p.m.

00:24:42

When I'm getting ready for bed.

00:24:44

So I'm planning that entire day and visualizing that entire day.

00:24:48

And sometimes like today, that included going on a Costco run before lunch, like,

00:24:54

like oddly enough, I was even visualizing the route to Costco when I was going

00:25:02

through that this morning.

00:25:02

So it kind of, I don't know, sometimes it's weird.

00:25:05

Yeah, I guess that's probably why I projected it as your workday because your

00:25:09

workday as a self employed person is something that you can control.

00:25:12

Right.

00:25:12

If you go to Costco with your family, you may have visualized it and I guarantee

00:25:16

you it's not going to go the way you visualize it.

00:25:18

No, no, which is why like I can visualize the trip there.

00:25:22

Like I can do that knowing that it's possible.

00:25:24

I'll make a wrong turn somewhere.

00:25:25

Like it's just possible visualizing what actually happens when we're in the store.

00:25:30

That's not worth your time, like just skip that, just, just do a fast forward

00:25:34

mentally and then do the trip home and how it's going to work once you get home,

00:25:38

knowing that these things can all change and just kind of setting yourself up for

00:25:43

these are the different paths that you could take when you're at that point.

00:25:45

Like that's kind of what I'm doing, but yeah, don't even try.

00:25:50

Like I'm going to go look at this and then I'm going to go down this aisle and

00:25:52

then I'm going to go do no, no, don't.

00:25:54

You're a crazy maker if that's what you're doing.

00:25:58

So man search for meaning.

00:26:00

Yeah.

00:26:01

So that's the book for today, which was my choice.

00:26:04

And to be honest, I don't have a specific reason for picking this.

00:26:10

That's bookworm related other than I've heard a lot about Victor

00:26:14

Frankl and was inspired by reading 30 lessons for living.

00:26:19

I mentioned that as one of my, my gap books where the guy interviewed a bunch

00:26:24

of the people who's who lived through World War II.

00:26:27

And basically his position was that they were more qualified to talk about

00:26:30

what makes a successful existence, you know, a happy life than people who haven't

00:26:35

had to go through and suffer those things.

00:26:37

Well, nobody alive today probably has suffered much more, if at all, than Victor

00:26:45

Frankl, who survived a World War II concentration camp.

00:26:48

And so that is what this book is all about.

00:26:51

What I find really interesting about this book, by the way, right at the beginning,

00:26:55

did you read the introduction?

00:26:57

Yes, I did.

00:26:58

OK, the introduction really just sets the tone because he talks about how he didn't

00:27:05

even want his name attached to the work.

00:27:09

Like he didn't want to have quote unquote credit for writing this.

00:27:13

He just wanted to write it so that people could be encouraged by his beliefs on

00:27:18

logo therapy.

00:27:19

He even talks about how he doesn't really want to recount everything that happened

00:27:24

in the concentration camps because there's so many other works or

00:27:26

so many other books that have been written by people that talk specifically to that.

00:27:31

So really, like his purpose for writing this is not to gain fame or attention,

00:27:35

but really to try to help people.

00:27:37

And you can really believe that when you understand more of his story, but he

00:27:42

wanted it to be anonymous.

00:27:44

The other thing that really stands out, if you read the introduction, is that he had

00:27:48

an opportunity to escape this.

00:27:51

He was granted a visa to come to the US, I believe, so that he could finish his

00:27:56

research because he was writing a manuscript and I forget specifically the book

00:28:00

that he was writing, but he had an opportunity to leave the country.

00:28:02

But he chose to stay with his parents knowing their inevitable fate.

00:28:08

And like, that's how the introduction ends.

00:28:11

And you're like, okay, so everything that you're about to read now about how awful

00:28:15

these concentration camps were and all the pain, all the suffering that he went through,

00:28:17

he had the opportunity to escape that and he still said no.

00:28:22

Right.

00:28:22

Like man, and we'll talk as we go.

00:28:25

We'll talk at the end about like the book overall, but I mean, this really influenced

00:28:32

my, my life theme because he basically is saying I'm willing to go through all of

00:28:37

this stuff if I can help other people, if I can inspire other people, if I can

00:28:40

encourage other people.

00:28:41

It's easy to read this, not having had to live through something like that and say,

00:28:46

yeah, well, I care about other people.

00:28:48

I would do the same thing, but unless you're in that situation, you have no idea

00:28:52

what you would do and I'd like to project and say that yes, I could do that.

00:28:55

But honestly, I can't say that.

00:28:57

Yeah.

00:28:58

I would like to think that I could, but I cannot imagine a scenario other than it

00:29:03

would have to be supernatural, God given strength to make that decision,

00:29:07

knowing what is going to come.

00:29:08

Like that's just amazing to me.

00:29:10

I think it is fascinating that he, he didn't want credit for this.

00:29:14

And you got to give the guy kudos for that talking to a friend yesterday about

00:29:19

this particular book and said, we're going to record a podcast on this.

00:29:23

And somehow in the midst of this conversation, we get the honors of talking

00:29:29

about concentration camps, Auschwitz, World War two, the Holocaust, and somehow

00:29:35

show positive outcomes from it.

00:29:38

Like this is not a simple topic to, to jump into and to think about Victor

00:29:45

Frankel as seeing his journey through this horrific period and coming out with

00:29:54

some learnings that he really wanted to share with the world that is not about

00:30:00

the pain and suffering, that pain and suffering is simply an avenue to show his

00:30:05

theories on logotherapy in this case.

00:30:08

And that was his purpose.

00:30:10

He wanted to use his life as a prisoner to show the value of his theories.

00:30:17

And that is the sole purpose for him wanting to write this book.

00:30:21

Even though he had the chance to get out of this, like I was dumbfounded by that,

00:30:26

that you chose to stick around, knowing the fate that was going to come and come

00:30:33

out of it with in what we're seeing here, an amazing theory that is, I think,

00:30:39

very valuable for all of us.

00:30:41

So I really liked this as weird as it is to say that it is a valuable book I

00:30:46

found. And at the same time, this could be a very difficult conversation.

00:30:50

So I just want to preface it with that.

00:30:52

But at the same time, I think there is a lot of value in working through this

00:30:55

because the, the concepts that he explains that come out of having gone through

00:31:02

a, a concentration camp and he then takes what he learned as being a prisoner

00:31:07

and applies it to his patience after the war and showing them how to derive

00:31:14

meaning in life and then has the energy and wherewithal to write a book about

00:31:20

this. So again, it's not about the pain of concentration camps.

00:31:25

He uses a lot of stories from his experience to show the exact point he's

00:31:31

trying to make. But at the same time, like you, you can't come away with from

00:31:36

reading this without realizing some of the pain of those camps as well.

00:31:40

It's been a while since I've read, I think it was Ellie Wiesel, the book Knight.

00:31:44

I think I actually probably read that in high school.

00:31:47

And I remember thinking that that was one of the most depressing books that I've

00:31:52

ever read, which makes sense because it's a documentation of the horrors that

00:31:57

happened in these concentration camps.

00:31:59

But I did not feel that way about man search for meaning.

00:32:03

Now, Victor Frankel is known kind of as the attitude guy.

00:32:07

So you definitely see his positive view on things and how he applies that.

00:32:13

You know, the case for tragic optimism.

00:32:14

We'll talk about that in a little bit.

00:32:15

Like that does come through, but still at the beginning of this book, the first

00:32:20

section here where he describes the life in the concentration camp, it's very

00:32:24

difficult to read.

00:32:25

But that's why I think the introduction is so important because it sets the tone

00:32:30

as like he is qualified to speak to this.

00:32:32

You better just shut up and listen.

00:32:34

Right.

00:32:35

And that's what got me through it.

00:32:37

I mean, the first part of it is really, even the first part of it is really

00:32:41

difficult and it doesn't get any better in my opinion, but at least from somebody

00:32:46

who wants to believe that, you know, this type of thing couldn't happen again.

00:32:52

I was able to get through it and my wife had the same reaction.

00:32:57

She read it.

00:32:57

Actually, everybody in my family read it while we were on vacation.

00:33:00

I read it.

00:33:00

I told my wife she needed to read it.

00:33:02

She almost couldn't get through like the first 10 pages.

00:33:04

But then once she got through that, like she had no trouble getting through the,

00:33:07

the rest of it.

00:33:08

And then my, my mom and my dad actually read it as well.

00:33:12

His experience, he doesn't project it as a way just to glorify the pain and the

00:33:19

suffering he shows that the pain and the suffering really for him points to a

00:33:23

deeper meaning and a purpose, which I know we'll get into when we talk about

00:33:28

logotherapy, but going back to this first section here, the place to start here,

00:33:33

I think is these three phases of mental reaction.

00:33:36

This really stood out to me where as people were coming into the concentration

00:33:41

camps, he mentioned that they would go through these three phases.

00:33:44

The first one is the period following admission and the symptom there he talked

00:33:49

about was shock.

00:33:50

And then the second phase is the period when they're well entrenched in the

00:33:55

camp routine and at that point, the symptom is apathy.

00:33:58

And then the third phase of mental reaction, which is the most interesting to

00:34:03

me and he gets into this later in the book is the period following release and

00:34:08

libation because there were a lot of people as awful as those concentration

00:34:12

camps were the transition back to normal life was even harder because they would

00:34:16

go back to their homes.

00:34:18

No one would, it was almost like people didn't even care that they were gone.

00:34:22

Like life had moved on and when they would tell people about their experiences

00:34:26

and the pain and the suffering, it was kind of like, oh, well, that's too bad,

00:34:29

sort of a thing.

00:34:30

I can kind of understand how that could really have negative psychological effects.

00:34:34

But again, like unless you're in that situation, it's hard to say how you would

00:34:39

respond, but I can, I can totally see how somebody's reaction could be little

00:34:45

your pain in your suffering.

00:34:46

So if you believe that the pain and the suffering that you're going through is

00:34:49

for a reason and that's really what Victor Frankles talking about through

00:34:53

this whole thing is the reason, not reason for the pain and suffering, but

00:34:58

using the pain and suffering, like this is what life is asking of you.

00:35:01

What are you going to do with it?

00:35:02

Are you going to help other people with it?

00:35:05

Or are you just going to give up and run into the wire as he talks about in

00:35:10

page 18, which is, I guess, one of the most common ways to commit suicide was to

00:35:14

run into the electrical fence.

00:35:16

And he said, I made myself a firm promise on my first evening in the camp

00:35:19

that I would not run into the wire.

00:35:20

Having the belief that all of this is so that I can help other people, that can be

00:35:27

great while you're in the concentration camp and then you get out into the world

00:35:30

and you're not surrounded by the people that you're in the camp with every single

00:35:33

day and nobody else seems to care.

00:35:35

I can see how at that point you're asking yourself, well, what was it all for?

00:35:38

What was, what was the point of all that?

00:35:41

Yeah, and I mean, if you think about World War II in Europe and being released from

00:35:48

one of these concentration camps and going home, the entire country was

00:35:53

devastated and everyone had their own story.

00:35:57

Everyone had their own difficulty that they were going through and someone comes

00:36:03

along and says, look, here's my story of what I went through.

00:36:06

You know, everybody's got their own.

00:36:08

So like, oh, well, yeah, that's your story, but I've got one too.

00:36:12

So I think it was probably very difficult for people to be empathic and

00:36:17

understanding and show any form of grace or mercy in that scenario, just because

00:36:22

everyone had their own difficulties.

00:36:25

They were dealing with it was, it was hard for them to build into other people

00:36:28

when they themselves were struggling.

00:36:29

So this whole section of life in the concentration camp, especially when he

00:36:33

spells out these three phases, it's difficult to come to grips with for us.

00:36:38

And I kind of struggled with, here's what life was like in the concentration camp.

00:36:43

Something I was trying to do is translate that into how does this apply to my

00:36:49

life and what the way that I live.

00:36:52

And although it's difficult to make some of those connections, the mindsets, I

00:36:57

think are very relevant, which we'll get into that later.

00:37:01

But I do think it was very difficult to read through this first bit, but it was

00:37:06

interesting to see how the first phase of people being in shock, absolutely

00:37:11

everything was stripped from them and they became nothing more than a number.

00:37:15

And that's one of the most dehumanizing and demoralizing things that you could

00:37:21

ever do is take someone's personality away from them and just turn them into a

00:37:25

number.

00:37:26

Like I don't even want to comprehend it.

00:37:27

But that's where he's talking about is with that shock and then getting into

00:37:31

the second with the, the, the phase of apathy.

00:37:34

It's exactly what he's talking about throughout the rest of the book is unless

00:37:37

you have a purpose and meaning for your life, there's no point.

00:37:41

And he refers to story after story of people who didn't find a meaning for or,

00:37:49

or a purpose for the suffering that they had to go through.

00:37:52

And that by itself killed them.

00:37:55

It wasn't necessarily a disease.

00:37:58

It wasn't necessarily one of the guards.

00:38:00

It was simply that lack of hope that ended up being the killer for them.

00:38:05

And that's hard to read.

00:38:07

I think that's going to be the running theme here today, Mike, is this was hard to

00:38:11

read. It was very valuable, but it was difficult.

00:38:14

I think there's, there's some value in reading this for sure.

00:38:18

But I think you really have to, you have to be aware of the difficulties and,

00:38:23

and be willing to translate the mindsets that he's talking about because the shock,

00:38:28

the apathy and the rejection that comes afterwards in trying to reintegrate.

00:38:33

I think those are all phases that we could probably see in our own lives in

00:38:37

some way or another.

00:38:38

And I think that's the most important part here is trying to figure out how you

00:38:41

translate some of this into your own day to day, which isn't simple.

00:38:45

I wish it was.

00:38:46

It would make this a lot easier to read.

00:38:48

I think right.

00:38:49

And just to clarify for the listeners who have not read this book, that's

00:38:54

basically what Victor Frankel says to do at the end is like, here's how you apply

00:38:59

this to your own life.

00:39:00

So it can maybe come across as we're talking about this, you know, this guy's

00:39:05

talking about his experience in a concentration camp.

00:39:07

We're talking about dealing with kids who are interrupting a deep work time,

00:39:11

but you can't compare those two.

00:39:13

Okay.

00:39:14

We know that we're not trying to project that those are the same thing because

00:39:19

they are not at all, but he's basically saying that this logotherapy apply

00:39:24

to any situation he talks about, you know, we'll get into this, the existential

00:39:29

vacuum and self transcendence and the epidemic of today is this boredom and

00:39:35

purposelessness.

00:39:36

Like that definitely applies regardless of the context that you talk about that.

00:39:40

So coming back to the hope section here, this is really powerful, but also before

00:39:48

he gets into this, he kind of sets the stages like he struggles with this himself

00:39:53

on page 29.

00:39:54

He talks about he, though somebody in one of the bunk houses at night who was

00:40:00

having a terrible nightmare and he says, quote, suddenly I drew back the hand,

00:40:04

which was ready to shake him frightened at the thing I was about to do.

00:40:06

At that moment, I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream,

00:40:10

no matter how horrible could be as bad as the reality of the camp, which surrounds

00:40:14

us and to which I was about to recall him.

00:40:16

So he's not in a privileged situation in these camps, which some of the people

00:40:21

were, I mean, he talks about the capos, which were prisoners acting as trustees.

00:40:27

They basically had special privileges within the camp and they, he says, fared

00:40:32

often better in the camp than they had in their entire lives, but they were more

00:40:36

cruel to their fellow prisoners than even the guards.

00:40:40

So he's in the trenches with everybody else as he's talking about the power of hope.

00:40:46

And the story that really stuck out to me about this is the story of the, the

00:40:51

Black Warden.

00:40:52

He had a dream that they would be freed by March 30th and he was optimistic.

00:40:59

He was peppy.

00:41:00

He was hopeful up until about March 29th and then he got really sick.

00:41:05

And then on March 31st, he died when it became evident that his dream, you know,

00:41:11

it wasn't going to come to pass and his hope was, was gone.

00:41:14

So like that, that hit me, that Victor Frankl's job in this concentration camp,

00:41:19

all the stories that he'd talked about and the different interactions that he had

00:41:22

with this fellow prisoners was basically to give them hope.

00:41:27

And I think that that's something that you can apply to your own situation and is

00:41:33

one of my, actually my only action item for this, you know, looking for

00:41:37

opportunities to alleviate the suffering of others.

00:41:39

And a lot of that, I think, manifests itself as giving other people hope.

00:41:43

So let me, let me translate this into something as maybe a little more

00:41:48

relatable for, for some of us.

00:41:50

And that is in side projects, you know, that's, it's one of the, the tenets of

00:41:55

people who work from home or their own boss or even folks who have a nine to five.

00:42:00

So it seems like everybody I talk to has some form of a side project and it's

00:42:06

apparent at the very beginning that there's a lot of excitement.

00:42:11

There's a lot of shiny new that comes with a new side project and they go pretty

00:42:16

well, you can deal with some setbacks here.

00:42:18

They are pretty easily, but over time, if it's not coming to fruition as you

00:42:24

originally thought, you eventually lose hope in that particular project.

00:42:29

And it, and it seems like the moment that switch is turned off, that you lose hope

00:42:35

in that project, it's dead immediately.

00:42:37

Like, that's just the way that that project ends up is the moment you decide

00:42:42

that this is not actually going to go anywhere and you lose the excitement that

00:42:47

comes with it, it's gone.

00:42:48

And, you know, this is an extreme example that Frankl gives us here in that it

00:42:53

cost the man his life when he lost that hope.

00:42:55

But I think if you translate it into our day to day, there's a lot of things that

00:43:00

we think are exciting and we have projects that are very positive and could be

00:43:05

extremely important to use the urgent important paradigm.

00:43:08

You know, if it's a highly important project, but you lose hope in it, you have

00:43:12

nothing left to work for on it.

00:43:13

Like you can keep working at it, chipping away at it.

00:43:16

But for what?

00:43:17

It's not going to go anywhere unless you can find some purpose behind it or find

00:43:21

some form of excitement with it again.

00:43:24

So I don't know.

00:43:25

Do you think it's a fair translation there?

00:43:27

I feel like I'm kind of stretching to get there with it, but that's, that's kind

00:43:31

of how I managed to make that connection in my own mind.

00:43:34

It's definitely a stretch, but I think you're right on.

00:43:37

I think the rephrasing it a little bit would be finding your why, whether that

00:43:42

be a why to live or a why to pursue a particular project.

00:43:47

You're not going to follow through with it, given the circumstances that are

00:43:51

working against you unless you have a strong enough why.

00:43:55

And that is the reason that Victor Frankl's attitude is so impressive because he

00:44:03

basically shows you how you can determine this at any given point.

00:44:08

And page 66, he says, everything can be taken from a man, but one thing, the last

00:44:12

of the human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances

00:44:16

to choose one's own way.

00:44:18

And later on in page 71, he talks about how it became easy to overlook the

00:44:23

opportunities to make something positive of camp life as him being real again.

00:44:28

But then he also follows it up by saying opportunities, which really did exist.

00:44:33

So the fact that there's all this pain and suffering going around you, happening

00:44:36

around you doesn't mean that there aren't those opportunities to make something

00:44:40

positive of that camp life, even in the camp, his life had meaning.

00:44:46

He talks about how life became meaningless when prisoners lived in the past, when

00:44:50

there was no why that was driving them towards their future.

00:44:53

I think that's a very important distinction.

00:44:55

You can look back at the past through rose color glasses and say, Oh, I wish

00:44:59

things were like, like this again.

00:45:02

You know, but viewing camps, difficulties is a test of inner strength.

00:45:05

He talks about that actually brought meaning when you can view the situation

00:45:09

that you're in as a challenge and recognize how it's going to make you better.

00:45:13

But there has to be hope tied to that.

00:45:15

I mean, obviously I wasn't in that camp.

00:45:17

I can't speak to this, but I would feel fairly confident saying that pretty much

00:45:21

everybody there was not just trying to survive, but they had that dream of being

00:45:26

reunited with their loved ones or they had that dream of going back to their, their

00:45:31

hometown.

00:45:32

And that's the thing that provided the why for them to, to put up with the, the

00:45:36

camp experience a page 76.

00:45:38

He quotes Nietzsche.

00:45:40

Nietzsche.

00:45:41

Yeah.

00:45:41

He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.

00:45:44

So if you've got that, that why, which is going to inspire actions and then,

00:45:49

especially if that why is tied to other people, I think that those are the

00:45:53

opportunities that he's talking about.

00:45:54

And those are the opportunities that literally everybody listening to this

00:45:57

podcast can apply to their own situation.

00:46:00

There are people around you who are suffering in some way, shape, or form.

00:46:04

And it may not be anything close to the degree that of something like Victor

00:46:08

Frankel went through.

00:46:09

But if you recognize those opportunities, you have the ability to make positive

00:46:15

change and a positive impact in people's lives.

00:46:17

That's what I want to do.

00:46:18

I kind of want to go on to this next point here.

00:46:21

The concept here is the danger of being liberated.

00:46:24

Can you explain that a little more?

00:46:26

He talks about how a man liberated is in danger because of the change in

00:46:32

pressure.

00:46:32

He equates it to a diver.

00:46:35

You know, when you're underwater and there's all that pressure, you've got the

00:46:38

oxygen tank.

00:46:39

If you come up real fast and the pressure changes, you're in danger.

00:46:43

And I'm not a diver.

00:46:44

So I don't know exactly what what happens there physically.

00:46:46

But I know enough about it to understand that like you have to kind of ease

00:46:50

back into the atmosphere, sort of a very non-scientific way of describing that.

00:46:54

But he basically talks about how there's two different responses typically when

00:46:59

people were liberated or two opposite ends of the spectrum, I guess.

00:47:03

So some who were liberated became instigators of willful force and injustice.

00:47:10

And in his words, it kind of became like the capo is in the camp.

00:47:13

And I don't know if they thought that they had the right to do this sort of a

00:47:17

thing because it had been done to them.

00:47:19

I can kind of see how people would think that.

00:47:22

But that's obviously not the correct response and probably not what those

00:47:26

people would say that they had wanted.

00:47:28

But he shares a story about how he's walking through this farm field with a

00:47:32

friend of his and he's like taking the barley or whatever, the crop that's

00:47:36

growing.

00:47:36

He's like plucking the heads off of it.

00:47:38

And Victor says, Hey, you shouldn't do that because the crops are still young.

00:47:41

You're going to ruin the harvest and the guy gets mad.

00:47:42

And he's like, after everything that was taken from me, you're going to get mad

00:47:45

at me for taking this, you know?

00:47:46

And so I can see how that kind of manifests as the second one here, the

00:47:50

entitlement from things being taken from them.

00:47:52

So you can say, well, I've had all these things happen to me.

00:47:56

I'm going to inflict this on other people.

00:47:57

And then the other thing is not just the fact that you're following through

00:48:02

with these hurtful attitudes, but then the entitlement that comes from that.

00:48:06

It's like, I deserve this.

00:48:07

I have the right to do this.

00:48:09

When everybody in those camps, I'm going to assume that they all thought that they

00:48:13

were unjustly placed there, that no one had the right to put them there.

00:48:19

So having to come to groups with that in your mind and the amount of time that

00:48:23

you've had to be in that camp and all the things that you've gone through.

00:48:27

Again, I can see how like that, that switch gets, gets flipped, but it becomes

00:48:33

very evident when Victor's talking about his experience with these other people.

00:48:36

And you can see like his example versus their example.

00:48:39

And it becomes very evident as you're reading that, like this is the right way,

00:48:44

the healthy way to respond to this situation.

00:48:48

But he shares a lot of examples of people who didn't make that adjustment.

00:48:51

Yes.

00:48:52

The way that you wrote this, the danger of being liberated, it does recall a lot of

00:48:59

the stories around what happens after release and how the concept of being set

00:49:07

free removes all of the structures that they had become reliant on.

00:49:12

And all of the pieces that they knew they could count on day to day are all gone.

00:49:17

And yet they are still in a concentration camp and they are not entirely free yet.

00:49:23

They're kind of in that flux zone of, you know, technically we've been liberated

00:49:27

and yet we're not home and fully recovered yet.

00:49:31

So it's that recovery state that this kind of made me recall.

00:49:35

But there's some struggle that I think I have with communicating how that relates

00:49:42

to our current day to day and how you would connect those dots.

00:49:46

But it might have something to do with after you've been released from some form

00:49:52

of a project you weren't happy about and wasn't going well.

00:49:55

Say your boss had something that you were working on for them and you felt like

00:50:00

it was the worst thing ever.

00:50:02

And then all of a sudden it's let go.

00:50:04

Maybe there's a translation there.

00:50:06

This kind of gets into the next section here.

00:50:08

But basically when you have something that is a part of your life and then all

00:50:13

of a sudden it is not there, you have to fill that with something.

00:50:18

And I think that this has a very real parallel in the productivity space as well.

00:50:24

I know a lot of the things that people disagree with when it comes to quote

00:50:28

unquote productivity is just cranking out more widgets.

00:50:32

And I think that for myself or a lot of people, the experience goes from your

00:50:38

inner situation, you're looking for a way to change the situation into a situation

00:50:43

that you prefer, a different outcome, something that you want to achieve.

00:50:46

And then once you get there, then if you don't have another vision, another goal,

00:50:52

another why, it can be easy to just fill that vacuum with stuff.

00:50:57

And then now all of a sudden you're way too busy again.

00:51:00

So for me, for example, I wanted the flexibility to create my own schedule.

00:51:05

I wanted to be able to take it off and go to the museum with my kids.

00:51:10

If we're going to do a field trip because my wife and I homeschool our kids, mainly

00:51:14

my wife, she's, she does a great job.

00:51:17

But when I first made the transition to working with Asian efficiency is like,

00:51:21

yes, this is great.

00:51:22

I have all this flexibility.

00:51:23

But then what happens over time?

00:51:25

You find additional side projects.

00:51:27

You find additional things that you want to work on.

00:51:29

You start podcasts like Bookwort.

00:51:30

Yes.

00:51:31

All of a sudden the margin gets, gets chipped away.

00:51:33

And if you don't constantly go back to the drawing board and say, or maybe not the

00:51:38

drawing board, maybe the better word would be the chopping block and say, okay,

00:51:42

this thing that I have committed to right now, is this the right thing?

00:51:46

If you don't ask those questions, then you can very easily find yourself in that

00:51:51

same situation because that's what you're familiar with.

00:51:54

I think that's the big takeaway here regarding the danger of being liberated

00:51:59

is the fact that you might become what you become accustomed to.

00:52:02

That can apply to anybody.

00:52:04

This is one of the points that he brought up, which I thought was very interesting.

00:52:07

He mentioned some of his fellow prisoners who used to be light sleepers.

00:52:13

Anything that happened in the house would wake them up.

00:52:15

And when they were in the concentration camp, they're sleeping soundly right next

00:52:20

to someone like inches from their head who's snoring, like a chainsaw.

00:52:25

And his point was that he became convinced that human beings can become

00:52:30

used to anything.

00:52:32

Like you can get accustomed to absolutely anything that's going on around you.

00:52:36

You simply have to either be forced or be willing to to develop the endurance

00:52:42

or tolerance of that thing.

00:52:44

And I thought that was very interesting because so much of life in the

00:52:49

concentration camp is one, very difficult to comprehend.

00:52:53

And two, it's insane to think that people actually came through that and

00:52:59

survived in any way whatsoever.

00:53:02

And they did it and they came out.

00:53:05

The people who dealt with this stuff, you know, they became used to life going to

00:53:11

the fields and picking rocks or whatever it was that the guards decided to have

00:53:15

them do that time.

00:53:16

But I did think it was interesting.

00:53:17

People can get used to anything.

00:53:19

Yep.

00:53:19

And I think there's a lot of truth there that so many things we have going on in

00:53:24

our lives, we will become accustomed to having them happen or, you know,

00:53:29

simple things that you forget that something is sitting on the counter because

00:53:34

it's been there for two days and then you don't see it anymore.

00:53:36

It doesn't catch your attention because you're used to it and it took two days.

00:53:40

Like that's, that's how short of a timeframe that was necessary before it

00:53:45

became something that was regular and just required to be there.

00:53:48

So I think it's interesting how, how quickly you can do that.

00:53:53

And even at the extreme of being in a concentration camp, like you can get used

00:53:58

to anything and whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing, you know, in

00:54:03

a lot of cases, it's probably bad.

00:54:05

Some cases it's good.

00:54:06

You know, it helps you survive.

00:54:07

But I think what you're getting at here is that sometimes we become accustomed

00:54:12

to the way things have always been and disrupting that feels like your arms being

00:54:17

ripped off of you because it's not the way it used to be.

00:54:19

How many times have we heard people say that, you know, that's how we've always

00:54:22

done it.

00:54:23

Yep.

00:54:24

Praises it driving nuts without ever thinking if it has to be that way.

00:54:28

Right.

00:54:28

On page 77, he says, we had to learn ourselves and furthermore, we had to teach

00:54:33

to the despairing men that it did not matter what we expected from life, but

00:54:36

rather what life expected from us.

00:54:37

It's a perspective shift that is possible regardless of your situation.

00:54:42

You can learn to see things differently and realize that, you know, it doesn't

00:54:45

have to be this way.

00:54:47

There can be meaning in this, good can come from this.

00:54:50

And that really leads to on page 84, my favorite part of this whole section of

00:54:55

the book and maybe my favorite part of the entire book is when the block warden,

00:55:00

who had taken a liking to Victor, he was basically trying to rally the troops.

00:55:05

He was trying to encourage people, the light had gone out and it was near the

00:55:09

end and people were just at the lowest of the low.

00:55:12

And he gets everybody together and then essentially says, okay, Victor, you talk.

00:55:18

Yeah.

00:55:19

And he talks about how he didn't want to, but he did.

00:55:24

And on page 84, he says the purpose is kind of after he had given the speech.

00:55:28

Page 84, he says, the purpose of my words was to find a full meaning in our life,

00:55:32

then in there, in that hut and in that practically hopeless situation.

00:55:36

I saw that my efforts have been successful.

00:55:39

When the electric bulb flared up again, I saw the miserable figures of my friends

00:55:43

limping towards me to thank me with tears in their eyes.

00:55:47

But I have to confess here that only too rarely had I, the inner strength to make

00:55:51

contact with my own companions and suffering and that I must have missed

00:55:55

many opportunities for doing so.

00:55:57

I really like this story because the moment of greatness in essence was

00:56:03

thrust upon him, where he didn't ask for the audience.

00:56:07

He didn't ask for the opportunity to speak.

00:56:09

He didn't want the opportunity to speak, but it was given to him and he made the

00:56:13

most of it.

00:56:14

And you can kind of get from that short passage.

00:56:17

We don't really know all the impact that that had, how many people's lives,

00:56:21

that speech actually saved.

00:56:22

But you can kind of get the idea here that a lot of people, their perspective was

00:56:28

changed because of Victor Frankl following through on this.

00:56:32

And that really is where that story is what led to my, my action item to look for

00:56:37

those opportunities to help suffering people because I do believe that they are

00:56:41

literally all around us.

00:56:42

And even if it's something very, very simple, maybe it doesn't even look like

00:56:47

it's important.

00:56:48

If I can change something and brighten somebody's day, like I want to be able

00:56:52

to recognize that and to do that.

00:56:53

Yes.

00:56:54

So the existential vacuum here is basically that you have to have some form of

00:57:00

meaning in order to exist.

00:57:02

Is that fair?

00:57:03

Is that a fair point?

00:57:03

Yep.

00:57:05

Exactly.

00:57:06

So this is, if you back up just a little bit, the existential vacuum is tied to

00:57:10

existential frustration when he first brings up this topic and he talks about

00:57:14

three different meanings, one existence itself to the meaning of existence or

00:57:18

three, the striving to find a concrete meaning in personal existence, the will

00:57:23

to meaning.

00:57:23

And so the existential vacuum is not having that meaning for your life in the

00:57:31

the section that this appears in.

00:57:33

This is the second section of the book, the logo therapy in a nutshell.

00:57:36

He talks about how boredom is the existential vacuum for people as he's, as

00:57:42

he's writing this.

00:57:43

He says on page 106, they're haunted by the experiences of the inner emptiness.

00:57:46

The void within themselves, they are caught in that situation, which I have

00:57:50

called the existential vacuum.

00:57:52

Boredom is now causing and certainly being a psychiatrist, more problems to

00:57:55

solve than distress.

00:57:56

These problems are growing increasingly crucial for progressive automation will

00:58:00

probably lead to an enormous increase in the leisure hours available to the

00:58:03

average worker.

00:58:04

The pity of it is that many of these will not know what to do with all their

00:58:08

newly acquired free time.

00:58:10

So he's applying this lack of meaning.

00:58:13

He's the one who lived through the concentration camps and was trying to

00:58:17

inspire people there that their life had meaning.

00:58:19

He's now talking about the great struggle being that this existential

00:58:25

vacuum is applying to people who have too much leisure time.

00:58:27

I mean, this sounds a lot like flow.

00:58:29

And again, you can't compare like not knowing what to do because you're bored

00:58:33

with being in a concentration camp, but he's basically saying that it's the

00:58:37

same cause, like you have to have this purpose.

00:58:40

If you don't, you're going to be depressed.

00:58:42

You're going to you're going to succumb to this existential vacuum.

00:58:45

And this is going to drive you crazy.

00:58:47

I read an article.

00:58:49

I had to hunt this down for the show notes, but I read one here a few days

00:58:54

ago that was talking about how we basically idolize convenience and we'll

00:59:02

do a lot in order to have a product or a service that will do things for us

00:59:08

that we find valuable.

00:59:09

And the article is spelling out how that can be a very detrimental thing

00:59:16

that we've become so engrossed with convenience that it

00:59:20

der it completely degrades meaning to life.

00:59:24

It takes us that far.

00:59:26

So unless you have a purpose of something that you need to struggle through,

00:59:30

you follow that path and you end up in a place where there's no reason for you

00:59:34

to be living at all.

00:59:34

And that's essentially what that article was calling out was you go down

00:59:39

this, this journey and this adventure of trying to help make things simpler

00:59:43

for yourself and take the difficulty out of it.

00:59:46

It eventually means that there's no reason for you to be around because

00:59:51

you're just the one communicating to all the other services and all the other

00:59:54

people to do stuff for you and using products that do stuff for you.

00:59:57

You're just pushing buttons and pulling levers.

00:59:59

That's all you end up doing.

01:00:01

And you know, you can kind of see that we have so many different appliances

01:00:06

and things that are designed to help do things quicker and easier.

01:00:10

And that's fine.

01:00:11

But I think at some point you have to stop and say, no, I'm going to do this

01:00:16

the hard way.

01:00:16

Like I have a manual coffee grinder.

01:00:18

Like it's not even electric.

01:00:21

Like I crank it by hand and there's something oddly satisfying about that.

01:00:26

Yes, it will take me a little bit longer.

01:00:28

Yes, it requires me to exert a little energy.

01:00:30

But there's some weird satisfaction that comes with doing that that I have

01:00:37

learned that is very valuable.

01:00:39

I think maybe it plays into this convenience meaning thing to to some extent.

01:00:44

Maybe I'm stretching this always, but I'm okay with that.

01:00:47

This is what I'm trying to come to grips with here lately is where is this line

01:00:53

of being okay with devices and tools and products and services that make my life

01:01:00

easier.

01:01:01

When should I not be doing that?

01:01:02

Because if I continue down that path and have lights that turn on for me

01:01:07

automatically when I walk in the room and music that will kick on and off for me

01:01:12

automatically and the garage door shuts behind me automatically.

01:01:16

And, you know, maybe my car takes me where I want to go automatically.

01:01:20

Like things just take off and do their own thing and help me do things, but they

01:01:25

do it for me.

01:01:26

Although I'm hesitant to say that's a really bad thing.

01:01:30

I think it can become detrimental unless you fill that time or the space was

01:01:36

something that has a lot more meaning than than what you were previously.

01:01:40

Because I think you can end up in a place where why you even exist.

01:01:44

I think that's where some of this existential vacuum can come in and help

01:01:47

you trying to derive like, what is your purpose here?

01:01:50

Like, what is the meaning that you're trying to find?

01:01:53

Like, what are those pieces?

01:01:55

And do we use a lot of these tools and apps and services?

01:02:01

Like we go so far down that path that we lose the full effect of the thing.

01:02:08

I think this is maybe why I'm on paper and kind of chastise you a little bit for

01:02:12

not yet.

01:02:13

I'm going to win eventually.

01:02:14

We shall see.

01:02:17

I'm not going to hold my breath there.

01:02:19

This might be partly why I've gone back to quote, unquote, the old school way of

01:02:25

writing things on papers because it does give me a lot of freedom and it helps me

01:02:31

feel like there's more purpose in what I'm doing and it has a bigger impact than

01:02:36

trying to use an app or a service.

01:02:38

These are things I've been playing around with.

01:02:40

So it's interesting that this comes up in the midst of this book.

01:02:43

I think that there is some value to the force constraints.

01:02:46

I think the point that he's making here is not that all of these things, which

01:02:53

make us more efficient are bad things.

01:02:56

It doesn't matter if you have all of these automations that you just

01:02:59

described, set up and it saves you all of these hours.

01:03:02

You get 10 extra hours a week from all these automations that you set up or you

01:03:07

just have an hour of free time.

01:03:08

If you don't have the why, if you haven't filled the existential vacuum, then

01:03:14

all of those things, regardless of the activity, all they're doing is they're

01:03:19

keeping you busy.

01:03:20

They're keeping your mind preoccupied and off of the main problem, which is

01:03:24

you haven't found your reason to live, you know, whether that is because you're

01:03:29

trying to figure out what project you want to work on next or you're trying to

01:03:33

stay alive in a concentration camp.

01:03:34

Again, not equating those two situations.

01:03:37

They are totally not the same.

01:03:38

Right.

01:03:39

First world problems.

01:03:40

I totally get that.

01:03:41

But I do know, I mean, I know a lot of people who deal with this.

01:03:46

And I think that this is worth considering.

01:03:48

You have to wrestle with these difficult questions.

01:03:51

You have to find an answer.

01:03:54

And that's the whole goal of this logotherapy.

01:03:58

And I don't know if I'm saying that right.

01:03:59

You pronounce it different and I kind of like the way that you said it better.

01:04:01

But he mentions that the goal of this is to fill the existential vacuum.

01:04:06

On page 104, he says, mental health is based on a certain degree of tension.

01:04:11

Attention between what one has already achieved and what one still has a lot to

01:04:15

accomplish or the gap between what one is and what one should become.

01:04:20

Such attention is inherent in the human being.

01:04:22

And therefore it is indispensable to mental well-being.

01:04:26

We should not then be hesitant about challenging man with a potential

01:04:29

meaning for him to fulfill.

01:04:30

So there's a lot in that specific quote that speaks to me directly.

01:04:35

Uh, we're talking about my life theme.

01:04:37

I mean, I read this and it gives me license in my mind to challenge people to identify

01:04:43

the reason that they're going to live.

01:04:44

It doesn't mean that I am qualified to say this is your reason.

01:04:48

But Victor Franco is basically saying then we should not hesitate to challenge

01:04:52

people and say, Hey, is this your reason for, for living?

01:04:55

Is this what you were created to do?

01:04:57

Is this your purpose?

01:04:58

Is this your why?

01:04:59

Just throw something out there because you don't know if somebody is going to

01:05:04

attach to that.

01:05:04

And it's important that they attach that because you cannot look back at the past

01:05:08

at what you have done, even if your life has been super productive and you've done

01:05:12

a whole bunch of stuff up until this point, that's all great, but it doesn't matter.

01:05:17

And it's not going to be enough if you don't know what the next thing is, if you

01:05:21

don't have that vision for a future, that's where this whole idea of the

01:05:26

existential vacuum comes in and really kind of leads into the next point here on the

01:05:31

meaning of life.

01:05:31

Cause obviously he talks a lot about, about this.

01:05:34

Yeah, he really goes into finding meaning in life.

01:05:37

And I thought it was interesting.

01:05:39

The number of stories he gave of people who come into his office after this is post

01:05:45

war, he's been released and he's, he's got his practice up and running now.

01:05:50

Was it psychiatry that he was in technically?

01:05:53

He had his own logotherapy thing that he was, he was teaching.

01:05:58

He has people coming to him for advice and, and, and trying to figure out what to do.

01:06:04

In difficult life scenarios, that's essentially what's going on.

01:06:07

Some of which he sees as not really, you really shouldn't be coming to me.

01:06:12

These are not difficult questions, which I thought was kind of funny that he called

01:06:16

out that you, you don't need to come see me.

01:06:19

Like you just need to decide what you're going to do in life instead of just avoiding

01:06:24

that decision.

01:06:24

Like that was, I thought that was entertaining.

01:06:27

Anyway, he does go through this, a number of these examples trying to spell out that.

01:06:32

If you're going through a season where you're struggling with a difficult relationship,

01:06:38

a difficult work situation, he tries to help you figure out the purpose of it and decide

01:06:45

what the benefit of suffering through that difficult time is.

01:06:50

And I think that's what his discovery of your meaning in life ends up being is how do

01:06:55

you determine the positives of the suffering that you're going through in order to derive

01:06:59

the meaning of the situation, which I think it'd be very helpful.

01:07:03

You know, I've got a handful of difficult situations that I could probably do this

01:07:07

to myself on and maybe find some benefit in that.

01:07:10

But at the same time, I'm not sure you can do that with yourself.

01:07:14

Maybe you can.

01:07:15

I kind of struggled with that part.

01:07:17

Do you think he could do it to yourself, Mike?

01:07:19

Uh, no.

01:07:21

So he mentions in this section that we can discover the meaning of life in three ways.

01:07:27

Number one, by creating a worker doing a deed, number two, by experiencing something

01:07:31

or encountering someone at number three, by the attitude we take toward unavoidable

01:07:35

suffering.

01:07:36

So I think the first two are within your control.

01:07:39

The third one is not, and he even says that suffering is not necessary to find meaning,

01:07:44

but meaning can be found even in suffering, which totally makes sense when you understand

01:07:50

his story and where he came from.

01:07:52

But what's interesting about this whole section on the meaning of life, because you

01:07:56

talked about it, people come to him and they say, what is the meaning of my life?

01:08:00

And he's like, yes.

01:08:01

He says on page one, oh, wait, what matters therefore is not the meaning of life in general,

01:08:06

but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.

01:08:11

So much in that one phrase, and we talked about it with my life theme at the beginning

01:08:16

of this episode, it's going to change.

01:08:18

That's what it is right now at this given moment, but it may not be the same a year from now.

01:08:24

It may not even be the same a week from now.

01:08:27

That's completely OK.

01:08:29

The example that he uses is the question, what is the best chess move in the world?

01:08:35

Do you play chess, Joe?

01:08:36

I used to.

01:08:37

I'm pretty familiar with chess.

01:08:38

OK, so I haven't played in a while.

01:08:41

I used to be really in a chess.

01:08:43

I was actually on a chess club and went to tournaments and stuff like that when I was

01:08:47

when I was younger.

01:08:48

I did not go that far.

01:08:49

Yeah.

01:08:50

I played for fun at the end of math class, but that's about as far as it went.

01:08:54

I'm totally the chess club geek nerd guy, but of course you are.

01:09:00

That explains a lot right there.

01:09:02

It does, doesn't it?

01:09:04

So it which has you've got?

01:09:06

I mean, there are entire books written on just like chess openings, which are the correct

01:09:11

moves to make when somebody else does a specific thing.

01:09:15

And so someone will open with a specific move and then, you know, the white goes first,

01:09:20

so they'll make their move and then black responds and they'll respond a certain way.

01:09:24

And it's this back and forth where you're playing based off of what the other person is

01:09:28

doing oftentimes and there's certain formulas you can follow.

01:09:33

So if somebody uses this opening, then you should use this opening, but it's impossible

01:09:38

to answer that question.

01:09:39

What is the best chess move in the world?

01:09:41

Because it totally depends on the current context.

01:09:45

It totally depends on the current position of the pieces on the board.

01:09:49

It is impossible to come up with an answer to that question that makes

01:09:53

any sense.

01:09:54

It's like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

01:09:56

What's the meaning of life 42?

01:09:58

Like it literally is that ridiculous.

01:10:00

And so on page 109, he says, one should not search for an abstract meaning of life.

01:10:05

Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete

01:10:11

assignment, which demands fulfillment therein.

01:10:13

He cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated.

01:10:17

Thus, everyone's task is as unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.

01:10:23

When I read this section of the book, this is a lot of what influenced my life theme.

01:10:28

I want to guide people through this process not to get them to arrive at the one correct

01:10:34

right answer, but just a answer, which is going to inspire action and give them direction

01:10:40

and give them a why for right now and give them the tools for them to modify it and change it in the future,

01:10:46

adapt and overcome.

01:10:47

You know, as life presents you new opportunities and new challenges that you are

01:10:52

equipped with the mental models and the questions to ask to adapt to those situations and to emerge successful.

01:10:59

I think that as long as you are searching for the answer to this question, it almost doesn't matter

01:11:04

what answer you you come up at.

01:11:06

And that's kind of the position that he takes with these people is like, well, I can't tell you what it is.

01:11:12

But I do think that you can give people the right questions to ask.

01:11:18

And then when they ask the right questions, the answers often become clear.

01:11:23

And I think this plays into your next point here to self-transcendence because it can require

01:11:29

yourself to kind of step away from it mentally, try to see yourself from outside of yourself

01:11:35

as if you were someone else, which I will admit is not always an easy thing to do,

01:11:39

especially when you're in the heat of something.

01:11:41

But when you're trying to discern what the meaning of your life is.

01:11:47

And I will say that our next book will get into this.

01:11:52

It kind of the nitty gritty of how to do this to an extent.

01:11:55

And I am kind of excited about that conversation.

01:11:59

It's why I brought it up a couple times now.

01:12:01

But I think there is a lot of value in being willing and being able to step outside of

01:12:07

yourself and kind of see the project, see the life that you're leading and discern whether or not

01:12:13

that's the path you want to be taking.

01:12:15

I would venture to say that in most cases, you will find multiple areas where you're not happy

01:12:20

with the current situation and that you want to change something significantly.

01:12:25

I think every time I've taken a few moments to try to see all the different arenas that I'm

01:12:32

working in and all the areas that I take on, whenever I try to see all of those in collection

01:12:37

outside of myself as if it was someone else looking at it, I very frequently will either

01:12:42

delete one or change one entirely.

01:12:45

So it seems like if you're able to do that, there's a lot of value there.

01:12:50

But I don't think it's something that we do regularly.

01:12:53

I wish I did it more.

01:12:54

Maybe I'm sitting here thinking like, I don't really technically have any action items down,

01:12:59

but this might be one of them.

01:13:00

Maybe I need to do this.

01:13:01

Maybe I need to schedule this for tomorrow.

01:13:03

Well, the one action item really that comes from this book is tied to this whole idea of

01:13:09

self transcendence because he really makes you come to grips with the fact that it's not about you.

01:13:18

Page 110, he says, being human always points and is directed to something or someone other

01:13:23

than oneself, be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter.

01:13:27

The more one forgets himself by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love,

01:13:34

the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.

01:13:38

This ties into what Chris Bailey told me when we were doing the productivity project.

01:13:45

Yes.

01:13:46

That people are the reason for productivity.

01:13:49

So it's great that you can get your work done more efficiently.

01:13:53

It's great that you can get more done in less time.

01:13:56

It's great that you can work smarter, not harder, but why?

01:14:00

Why are you doing that?

01:14:01

Is it so that you can check the boxes and crank out more widgets or is it so that you have the margin

01:14:08

and the time and the capacity to improve somebody else's existence?

01:14:14

And I think that for us, obviously, it's easy for that to manifest itself because we both got families.

01:14:19

Maybe you're single and you're trying to figure out how to be more productive.

01:14:24

OK, so I can't necessarily speak directly to that because that wasn't my journey into the productivity space.

01:14:31

My dad has a saying that when pain is sufficient, change will come.

01:14:35

Like that definitely was the case for me.

01:14:37

Yeah.

01:14:38

My family was growing up.

01:14:39

I wanted to be able to control the time that I had available to me and how I spent it with them.

01:14:45

But I think that I mean, I know with working with Asian deficiency that there are a lot of people who are single, who are looking to become more productive.

01:14:53

And my challenge to every single one of those people is why.

01:14:56

What are you investing in?

01:14:58

What is your cause?

01:14:59

What is the thing that is bigger than yourself?

01:15:02

And this really gets into the whole idea of passion.

01:15:05

I mean, I talk about this in my book.

01:15:08

The root of the word passion is the Latin word petit.

01:15:12

It literally means to suffer.

01:15:13

So when people say, I'm just not passionate about this thing, really, what it means is that they haven't found a reason why to do this thing that's strong enough for them to endure the suffering for them to put up with the discomfort.

01:15:24

And that really, I think, applies to any situation here as Victor Frankl is talking about.

01:15:30

When you have that why, that creates the passion that allows you to push through a lot of those

01:15:36

oppositions, a lot of those, those walls, a lot of those things that would come against you.

01:15:41

You know, Stephen Pressfield would talk about that too, the resistance like passion is what helps you overcome the resistance.

01:15:48

But in order for passion to show up, you have to understand why it is.

01:15:52

And this whole idea of self transcendence.

01:15:54

I mean, we are open about our Christian belief system.

01:15:57

So people can kind of guess where where we get that motivation.

01:16:02

But that's one of the things I love about working with Asian deficiency is that the core values point to this as well.

01:16:08

Number one, glow green, become the best version of yourself.

01:16:11

So that number two, they can help other people achieve the level of success that you've at least attained.

01:16:16

You can't really get people to the point that you haven't been yourself, but you can inspire people, encourage people and also teach people how to get to a certain level if you've gotten there first.

01:16:27

And so I really love this whole idea of self transcendence because it's, it's kind of this contagious discipleship model where you're coming alongside somebody and you're saying, Hey, let's walk together.

01:16:39

And I want to show you what I what I know, I want to teach you what I know.

01:16:44

If it can help you, then, then great.

01:16:46

I just want you to be able to benefit from my experience so that you don't make the same mistakes.

01:16:50

I can really appreciate whenever people say, don't do this.

01:16:55

Like I've been a part of a men's group and I'll talk about this book a little bit later as part of our gap books, but we're going through a book together and we had one of our pastors join that group.

01:17:06

This was two nights ago and had a list of things that he felt were, were vital to discussing the role of parents in things that you should or shouldn't do.

01:17:21

And I'm always grateful when, when you can have somebody who's been there, they've, they've gone through a difficult scenario in life and they come out, maybe not necessarily on top.

01:17:34

They may still be in the thick of it, but they know exactly like they've reflected on it enough to know these are the things that cause this.

01:17:42

This is why this is so terrible for me.

01:17:45

These are the things you should not do.

01:17:48

That's, that's extremely helpful. I just wish I would heed those more often.

01:17:52

Right.

01:17:53

Another thing regarding this whole meaning of life and self transcendence that he talks about on page 131, I think is really important.

01:18:01

He says, man does not simply exist, but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.

01:18:08

So that kind of gets into this whole idea that we've talked about self determination and personal responsibility.

01:18:14

Like it doesn't matter where you came from, what you've gone through.

01:18:17

You can change starting right now.

01:18:20

He even says, man is capable of changing the world for the better, if possible, and of changing himself for the better, if necessary.

01:18:28

But that will never happen if you don't believe that you have the ability to do that.

01:18:32

And you're not connected to the, the why, the self transcendence, the idea, the, the vision of something bigger than yourself.

01:18:40

But in the next section, he has a phrase, he says, the meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.

01:18:50

I think that that really wraps up, you know, not only my life theme, but he's saying this in context of everybody reading this book.

01:18:57

So you can take my life theme and use it for yourself if you want.

01:19:01

But really what he's saying is that everybody's got some element of that.

01:19:05

Like the experiences that you have, the things that you have gone through, that builds a testimony in your life that you can use to help other people.

01:19:16

My pastor says, no testimony without a test, no message without a mess.

01:19:21

Like you have to go through some stuff in order to get the credibility to say, Hey, this is how this works.

01:19:27

But once you've done that, then you should use that to help other people.

01:19:31

I totally agree with that.

01:19:33

So let's talk about tragic optimism and he makes a case for tragic optimism, which is essentially looking on the bright side when terrible things are going on.

01:19:43

At least that's my probably gross simplification of the concept.

01:19:48

But you've got a point here saying yes to life with the tragic triad.

01:19:52

So he talks about the tragic triad being pain, guilt and death.

01:19:56

So these are all things that he experienced in the concentration camp, even guilt where he talks about.

01:20:03

We mentioned it a couple of times in this episode, real briefly, but there were opportunities for him to make the most of a specific, you know, specific situation and he didn't didn't do it.

01:20:12

And he felt guilty about that about his own self absorbance.

01:20:15

So though, how can you say that about somebody who lived through a concentration camp?

01:20:18

I mean, but he says it about himself.

01:20:20

So saying yes to life in spite of all of those things around you and then really this tragic optimism, this is kind of always thinking the best.

01:20:29

And he says that thinking the best allows for three things, turning suffering into human achievement and accomplishment.

01:20:35

Number two, deriving from guilt, the opportunity to change oneself for the better.

01:20:40

And number three, deriving from life's transitoryness and incentive to take responsible action.

01:20:46

I think that this is really the summary of tragic optimism.

01:20:51

If you're going to use this term, but this kind of outlines for me the how he had the wherewithal

01:20:59

to say yes to life in even though we talked about the first section of this book, he's describing all the atrocities of life in the concentration camp.

01:21:07

Again, I would love to say that, yes, I would be the person in the concentration camp who is encouraging other people.

01:21:12

But honestly, I can't say that because I've never been put through that sort of that sort of test.

01:21:16

And so it really is impactful when he is able to say because he's gone through those things, this is how you do this.

01:21:25

I think there's some value here in being okay with difficulties in life.

01:21:30

This can go back to this convenience thing I was talking about.

01:21:33

Having things that are not simple is okay.

01:21:36

And having things that can just destroy you mentally and emotionally, that's okay.

01:21:42

As much as I don't want them.

01:21:44

And I really don't like having difficulties.

01:21:48

They are and can lead to some of the best relationships and the best recoveries and some of the best moments that I think I ever experienced.

01:22:00

So even though there are things that I wish I never had to deal with, and I think it's fair to say that Victor Frankle would not have chosen the concentration camp bit.

01:22:12

If there was an option, although he did at the beginning, I get that, but not.

01:22:18

It's not like he decided, I'm going to go to the concentration camps and volunteer.

01:22:22

Like he didn't do that.

01:22:23

Exactly.

01:22:24

Yeah, I don't think he's saying that if there was an opportunity for the concentration camps not to exist versus for them to exist, I'm going to choose for them to exist and put myself in that situation.

01:22:34

Correct.

01:22:35

But he's balancing it with the fact that this is going to happen and I have the opportunity to escape it from myself or to embrace it for the good of everybody else.

01:22:44

And that's really what he did.

01:22:45

Yes.

01:22:46

And that's what I'm getting at is, you know, these aren't necessarily things that you would choose to go through.

01:22:51

But the fact that they, they exist and you go through them leads you to, if you're willing to see the positive side of it, they can lead to extremely beneficial and positive experience in the end.

01:23:05

I think that's what he's getting at was saying yes to life with the tragic triad.

01:23:09

You're choosing to be okay with the difficulties and learn from them as opposed to just trying to find ways to avoid them and being upset when they happen to you.

01:23:19

Like it's okay.

01:23:20

I mean, this can go back to Ryan holidays.

01:23:22

The obstacle is the way like you're choosing to work through that difficulty.

01:23:26

And that is the path that takes you towards a more meaningful.

01:23:30

And in this case, what he gets at here in a little bit is how to have a happy life, even though difficulties are going on and you may not want them to go on.

01:23:39

That's, I think what he's ultimately getting at here.

01:23:41

Yep.

01:23:42

I totally agree.

01:23:43

He mentions that happiness cannot be pursued.

01:23:46

It must ensue and that once the reason is found, one automatically becomes happy, which is why the vision or the why is so important.

01:23:56

In fact, in the previous section, he on logo therapy, he mentions that the word logos, the definition is meaning in Greek.

01:24:03

And he talks about the National Institute of Mental Health Study, which indicated that 78% of people, at least when he wrote this, said their first goal was finding a purpose and meaning to life.

01:24:14

So there's a huge percentage of people who are not in the concentration camp who are dealing with this exact thing and they feel miserable because they haven't found that reason yet.

01:24:25

And I think that it's a lot easier to figure out the reason than it is to try and manufacture happiness.

01:24:34

In fact, Victor Franklin, by happiness cannot be pursued.

01:24:36

It must ensue.

01:24:37

He's saying basically that you can't do that.

01:24:40

It has to come once you find that reason.

01:24:43

One other thing I forgot to mention regarding the meaning and making people happy, page 139, he really ties it all together.

01:24:50

He says, once an individual search for meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy, but all

01:24:55

it also gives him the ability to cope with suffering.

01:24:58

And he calls this give upitis, which I think that a lot of people could relate to that particular term.

01:25:04

Yeah.

01:25:06

So let's talk about this concept of collective guilt.

01:25:10

Before I jump in there, can you define that quickly?

01:25:12

Sure.

01:25:13

So collective guilt is projecting blame on an entire group of people based on somebody's actions or maybe a smaller group of people's actions.

01:25:22

And that's kind of my definition, but he uses an example, which we'll get to in a second.

01:25:27

But if you go all the way back to the first section, he talks about how there's two races of men.

01:25:32

There's no pure race.

01:25:33

There's decent men and there's indecent men.

01:25:36

And he even explicitly says it occasionally.

01:25:39

You found decent men, even among the guards in the concentration camp.

01:25:43

The story that he tells in the case for tragic optimism, the last part of this book regarding collective guilt is that he's

01:25:52

giving a speech somewhere.

01:25:53

And I think he's talking in German.

01:25:55

And this lady comes up to him and she says, how can you speak in the language of Hitler?

01:26:01

And he asks her, well, do you have any silverware at home?

01:26:07

Like do you use any you use knives when you're eating?

01:26:10

And she's like, yes.

01:26:10

And he's like, well, how can you use the weapon of killing for so many, so many murders or something like that?

01:26:16

And it was completely ridiculous.

01:26:18

But it really drove home his his point that you can't blame an entire group of people for something.

01:26:24

So in this particular case, you can't blame all the Germans for the Holocaust.

01:26:29

And this totally exists today.

01:26:31

I mean, I'm just going to say that you don't have to look very far to find entire groups of people, no matter where you locate yourself, who you have based your opinion on that group of people based on the actions or the statements.

01:26:48

Or the beliefs of a very small percentage of those people, probably just one or two, I would say.

01:26:53

I do agree with you.

01:26:54

I think this is running rampant right now.

01:26:56

And it is a difficult issue.

01:26:59

I'm not entirely certain what the solution is to this other than just be aware of it.

01:27:04

This is partly why I'm not super vocal about a lot of it.

01:27:07

But just being aware of it does get a long ways.

01:27:10

I agree with you that there's really not a ton that any one person is going to do that is going to completely change the landscape.

01:27:19

But I am challenged by this book because a lot of times we just avoid the things that we are unfamiliar with or we're uncomfortable with.

01:27:28

And if you think about, like, if I was going to go do this thing for this person or this group of people who I quote unquote hate, you know, I just don't like being around these types of people.

01:27:39

What's the worst thing that could happen?

01:27:42

They ridicule me, they make fun of me, they, you know, whatever.

01:27:46

I'm probably not going to be placed in a concentration camp.

01:27:48

Okay, so what have I got to complain about?

01:27:50

Right.

01:27:51

And what Victor Frankly is saying is that, yeah, we avoid those situations because they make us uncomfortable.

01:27:56

That little bit of suffering, that little bit of humiliation that I may have to go through in order to start a conversation with somebody.

01:28:03

If I am able to do that, then I want to do that. I'm challenged as I read this book to do that, to overcome the stereotypes.

01:28:12

And even not, I think there's a lot of people who maybe don't actively seek out these stereotypes.

01:28:18

We tend to gravitate to people who are like us.

01:28:20

We tend to go into our clicks or our communities or however you want to phrase it and avoid people who are not like us.

01:28:27

But I think that there is a lot of value and honestly a lot of these problems, I think that we could come a long way if we simply have the conversations.

01:28:37

So I am stating on this podcast, but again, like I won't know until I actually have the opportunity to do this.

01:28:45

You know, the rubber has to hit the road at some point, but I, having read this book, want to be the person who is willing to start those conversations,

01:28:54

to go across the aisle, you know, to borrow the political speak and to see other people as other people and not as the other people that make sense.

01:29:07

-Great. -Like fellow members of the human race, let's figure this out and let's recognize the fact that we both have value and figure out how to make the collective good,

01:29:18

you know, how we can advance the collective good. And I know that just having some of these conversations is not going, it's probably not going to change anybody's mind.

01:29:27

But I do think that a lot of this problem stems from just completely avoiding the conversations.

01:29:34

Yes, tall things. I agree with you. Let's talk about action items. All right, so you've got one action item here.

01:29:41

Yep. And this is, I've mentioned a couple times to look for opportunities to alleviate the suffering of others. This is kind of a natural follow-up to one of my other action items.

01:29:50

You mentioned the developing the ability to see things, developing my seeing skills, which is why I'm doing this picture day thing for the month of March.

01:29:59

And it may be a stretch to say that posting vacation photos is going to help me see the suffering of other people, but I think that the real skill that needs to be developed here is just the attention.

01:30:10

I know that I have the ability to alleviate quote unquote suffering in different situations if I would just recognize the opportunities like Victor talked about in section one of this book.

01:30:22

So I just want to get better at recognizing those. Fair point. I have one that I just wrote down as you were talking about that adding this transcendence concept to my weekly review and the time in the week,

01:30:34

whenever I just reconsider all of the projects and tasks and the like that I have going on. And just put a point on that checklist.

01:30:43

I'm already going through it and just put a point there to try to view the list of things I have going on and the roles that I'm in and take a look at those every week just to make sure that I'm on the right path.

01:30:54

So hopefully that'll help. Nice. All right. So author style and rating. This book profoundly impacted me.

01:31:03

I actually have a prepared statement for this. Wow. This is a first. Yeah. This kind of comes from the morning pages, but as I was reflecting on this, I felt I just needed to write this down.

01:31:20

Okay. So here we go. Why do we read books? Is it to learn how to do new things? Is it to be inspired by the actions of others? Is it simply to be entertained?

01:31:28

I believe we read books for the experience. A good book, even a nonfiction book, takes you on a journey. It tells you a story. It evokes an emotion.

01:31:37

A good book does not just speak at you, but it speaks to you. It challenges and motivates you. It makes you wrestle with the question of what would you do if you were placed in a similar situation.

01:31:47

Would you have the courage to act heroically and save the day or would you give in to the pressure, the problems and the pain?

01:31:52

But the best books encourage you that it is at least possible for you to act heroically and that you at least have a chance to make the shot rescue the princess or save the day.

01:32:01

This book does just that, but I'm not even sure how. It's not a work of fiction, but at times you wish it was.

01:32:08

What I have difficulty comprehending is how Victor Frankel is able to maintain a positive attitude and a will to live in the circumstances that he describes.

01:32:17

I'd like to think that I'd be able to act the same way to help those who are suffering around me, but I'm not qualified to make such a statement.

01:32:24

I can only hope and pray for that kind of strength, but Victor shows us that it is at least possible.

01:32:30

Not often do I find myself with nothing to say in response to a book, but that is indeed the case here.

01:32:36

I am not qualified to challenge any of this great man's opinions. I can only shut up and listen to what he has to say.

01:32:42

And he has earned that right to speak freely and to have those who are not tested in the fire of adversity to listen intently.

01:32:49

This is one of the best books I have ever read and believe that everyone should read this.

01:32:54

I am humbled and challenged to do better in my responses to my "problems" even if they are insignificant compared to what Victor Frankel went through.

01:33:03

So obviously I give this book five stars.

01:33:06

That's quite the statement. I don't think I could really add to that at all.

01:33:11

So with that statement and your five stars, I will simply say this is a challenging book.

01:33:16

It completely made me stop and rethink a lot.

01:33:21

And I don't know that we can really do this book very much justice talking about it without our listeners having read it.

01:33:31

So that being said, this is a pretty easy five star rating.

01:33:36

It sounds like from both of us.

01:33:38

And this is one that I am likely to pick up a handful of and hand out to people.

01:33:43

So there are very few that fall into that category. This is one of them.

01:33:47

I highly recommend it to everyone who's listening. If you have not read it, pick it up. Go through it.

01:33:53

It's a challenging read, but it will be well worth your time. I am quite certain of that.

01:33:57

I was reminded when I read this of an audio book that I listened to by Jim Rohn called The Art of Exceptional Living.

01:34:03

And he talks about the books that you should have in your library.

01:34:07

And he explicitly mentions that you should have a biography of Gandhi and you should have a biography of Hitler.

01:34:14

So you understand both ends of the spectrum.

01:34:17

And on page 34, he says our generation is realistic for we have come to know man as he really is.

01:34:24

After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

01:34:28

However, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

01:34:35

Like that is the perfect ending to this book. You need to read this even if nothing comes out of it other than your perspective is changed a little bit.

01:34:44

You get a little bit bigger view of what is possible in the world, both the good and the bad.

01:34:50

Alright, so we got our ratings, we got our style. What's coming up next is my choice here.

01:34:56

It's What's Best Next by Matt Perman.

01:34:59

I have mentioned this one a couple times.

01:35:01

This one's quite a bit different than what we've covered in the past because this one will be very clearly Christian.

01:35:07

There is no two ways about that one.

01:35:10

Tagline on it is how the gospel transforms the way you get things done.

01:35:14

I am about halfway through this one, Mike.

01:35:16

I've been restraining myself throughout our conversation today.

01:35:19

I'm just going to say that.

01:35:21

I'm looking forward to this conversation. That's what we got coming up next.

01:35:25

Nice. After that, I selected one from the recommended list, which is Busy by Tony Crab.

01:35:32

I have this book, but I haven't even looked at it. I know nothing about what it is.

01:35:36

This is 100% a listener recommendation.

01:35:39

Did you vet this before you selected it? You don't have a good track record with that.

01:35:44

I know. I know. But I at least know how long the book is.

01:35:48

Okay. All right.

01:35:49

Since it's on my bookshelf.

01:35:51

All right.

01:35:52

I had bought it at one point because it was something that I was interested in.

01:35:57

But I have not looked at it in quite a while.

01:35:59

When I was trying to pick a book for next time, there was not anything that I really wanted to read.

01:36:05

So I went to the listener recommendations list and picked this one.

01:36:10

Nice. I alluded a little bit to this earlier, but I've been doing a men's group

01:36:15

and wrapped up a book this week. Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters.

01:36:19

I may have had this as a gap book a while back because this is the third time I've read it.

01:36:25

If you have daughters, Mike, put you on this list now.

01:36:29

I recommend this one. It will change the way that you as a dad see your daughter

01:36:35

and how you relate to her.

01:36:37

I also terrify you in the first chapter or two based on some stats.

01:36:41

But anyway, I really like that book, which is kind of obvious since I've read it three times now.

01:36:46

Yeah. I'll have to take a look at that one.

01:36:49

My gap book is Anything You Want by Derek Sivers.

01:36:53

This is an interesting book in a very short read.

01:36:56

It is 40 chapters, I believe. They're all like a page or two long.

01:37:01

It's a smaller book by the guy who started CD Baby.

01:37:05

There's a lot of lessons here for any online entrepreneur.

01:37:09

Derek is an interesting guy and he tells a lot of stories about how he had opportunities

01:37:13

to sell out to some big labels and things like that.

01:37:16

He just is like, "Nope, I'm going to do it this way." Unconventional, but obviously very successful.

01:37:21

I definitely recommend this book.

01:37:24

If you have a recommendation to your listener, similar to what Mike has selected for the next,

01:37:30

I've got a few in the pipeline that are listener recommendations as well.

01:37:35

But if you want one on that list for us to choose from or think we should go through,

01:37:40

whether it's on the show or off the show, you can do that at bookworm.fm/recommend.

01:37:45

You can also find a book list out there.

01:37:47

You can make the recommendation there, but/list will also get you the list of books that we've already gone through,

01:37:54

the ones that are upcoming and the ones that have been recommended.

01:37:56

You can all on one page. It's pretty cool.

01:37:59

If you have a recommendation or you want to see any of those books, that's where you go.

01:38:03

If you want to help us take down KCRW and join the revolution, please go over to iTunes

01:38:11

and leave us a rating and review. It really bothers me that we are not the number one search result for bookworm.

01:38:17

Please help us out.

01:38:19

Leaving a rating and review really does help us out and it helps other people find out about the show.

01:38:24

That would be one way that you could support bookworm.

01:38:27

Another way that you could support bookworm if you wanted to is to use any of the links on the website.

01:38:32

Those are Amazon affiliate links. Those will help pay for the hosting and things.

01:38:36

We really don't make any money off of this podcast. It's just a fun project that we do.

01:38:41

That would help us out a little bit too.

01:38:43

Cool beans. Get your recommendations in. Pick up what's best next.

01:38:49

We'll go over that one in a couple weeks.

01:38:51

We'll talk about how the gospel transforms the way you get things done and talk about productivity, Mike.

01:38:57

This one might geek out. That one might be a long show. We'll see.

01:39:01

Maybe. Maybe we need a book through here.

01:39:04

Aren't they all long? This one's like two hours.

01:39:06

We're venturing into talk show territory.

01:39:09

I know. Scary.

01:39:11

If you're reading along, what's best next, we'll go over that one next time.